Technology's New Lens

We often don’t realize how much technology shapes our daily lives. A few decades ago, a cell phone was something out of Star Trek. But now new technologies seem less and less like science fiction and more like essential parts of our world. What we don’t realize is how much this can affect our perception.

For example, the new Nokia 8 allows you to take a picture of what is in front of you as it also records you and what is behind you. This is called a “Bothie” now adding to selfies, allowing people to take pictures forward and backwards simultaneously. The concept is simple—two lenses. But it blows open our habit of perception. Will we start to perceive like the proverbial teacher with eyes in the back of her head?

3-D printing is another way of seeing in new ways. It incorporates a full-sphere visual of the object being replicated. The blueprint of a hand tool can be sent to the International Space Station, where a 3-D printer creates the tool for astronauts to use. This cuts down on payloads launched and allows for devices to be created as they are needed. But it wouldn’t be possible without the technology that allows us to see in multiple dimensions. Inside the space station, astronauts float and summersault to move about. They tether themselves to a spot with a foot latch to anchor themselves to a place on the cylinder-shaped interior walls. Without gravity, our way of seeing the world changes. When the first crew left earth they were astounded by the sight of our Earth from outer space, it allowed them to see our world in new ways.

Even healthcare is rearranging. Robotic assists during medical surgery become a 360-degree eye that can image the space around and under the bones, nerves, tissues, muscles, and organs being operated on.

These new ways of recording, seeing, moving, working upend our basic assumptions. We can feel unmoored, as dizzyingly adrift as an astronaut floating in space. The ability to see all around us at once will be an acquired perception, much like a blind person suddenly given sight needs to learn to distinguish the depth of fields, the outline of forms. Add virtual reality to these multiple lenses, and the job of making sense out of what is real or imagined, what is forward or back, or what is in around the corner, requires a major adjustment in our senses and how we make sense of the world. The question is: What will you do with this new sight?

You’ve heard about trying to put square pegs into round holes. The message is they don’t fit. It’s one of the first games young children are taught—how to distinguish a circle from a square from a triangle. Once we learn this way of seeing, we tend to categorize. We determine the shape of things and figure out what fits where. As useful as this lesson is, it sticks so deeply that we forget there’s more than one way to see things, more than one approach to a problem, more than one way to write an equation.

In today’s world, visual information outranks text. Animations can show us dimensional fields. With 3-D printing machines, children can easily imagine multiple dimensions. So let’s teach them how what seems impossible is possible with a new way of thinking, and that there can be multiple correct answers to a question.

Have you ever looked at photograph of a human face upside down? It takes awhile for our eyes to process through our brain, to even be sure it is a face, much less a face we know. Our automatic recognition of the world is keyed to frame and name the familiar.

Today’s world can seem upside down. Accelerated change has made it almost impossible to find a fixed point that is not in flux. The shape of cities will alter as we go from cars we drive to cars that drive themselves. Drones multiply our capacities to see with 360 degree vision, both from above the landscape and within buildings .Think of astronauts floating in the space station, with no up nor down, somersaulting rather than walking. We relearn how to orient, how to pattern, while it’s all in motion.

Henry Ford said if he had asked people what they want, they would have said faster horses. If Steve Jobs had asked us, we could not have imagined icons that lead us to draw on a computer, icons that let us shop on a cell phone. So let’s be clear. Since we are in motion, since the new can come to us from any angle, we must start to see like a floating astronaut, alert in all directions.

Familiar patterns are coming to us upside down. Dylan the musician gave a concert in England in 1965 where the first half was his popular folksong style. The second half burst open with an electric band, full of unfamiliar sounds, that are now classics, such as Tell Me How Does It Feel from the song Like a Rolling Stone. Food is in fusion, from IndoChine to Tex Mex. Family systems now come in multiple combinations, as well as gender. It feels like a blend, a potpourri, but eventually fresh forms become their own new selves, like jazz, where African beats become American blues.

More voices are being heard today by more people than ever before. By voices I mean musicians, writers from all cultures, tech creations from drones to genomics.It is the age of participation, of networking, of the inane and the incredible in the same mix.It can disorient, seem raw, but also freshly intriguing, up to each of us to discern the pattern in unfamiliar terms, like recognizing a face upside down.

In my solo tent, under the night sky I was alone in the Colorado woods, during a leadership workshop. I looked to the night sky as my bedtime reading. Seeing the Big Dipper, I was immediately oriented. By finding north from the Dipper, I then knew south, east, and west off the North Star. I could find my place, thanks to the Dipper.

So needed, so sure is the image of a Dipper, it’s easy to forget the Dipper is in my mind, not the night sky. Before the Dipper was our automatic pilot, the same stars were seen by other cultures, in other centuries, on their own terms.

To Native Americans, these same stars connected to form a Bear. Early Greeks knew north from this cluster of stars as a Wagon. The Chinese drew a Heavenly Emperor to remember the stars. We can remember things by associating them with the familiar. But all too often we get stuck in thinking the familiar is the only answer. The stars do not change. Only the map in our mind changes.

Many of us learned the periodic table of elements as a grid, lined up in rows of stacked straight lines to give us a familiar order. It’s easy to think of the elements as locked in a grid. Yet the same sequence of chemicals can also be drawn as a helix, or sequenced twirling in loops, or organized in a torus, the shape of a donut. The sequence stays the same no matter the format. The grid is not in nature; the grid is in our mind.

What could be more absolute than the sun rising each morning? Yet to the astronaut in a space station, orbiting the Earth, there are sixteen sunrises in twenty-four hours. The eternal constants of nature do not change. We change our perspective, and the picture changes. The very thing we understood as absolute, changes to a partial piece of a larger scheme.

What could be more absolute than numbers? We are familiar with calculating by tens. Yet other number systems use bases of two or twelve or sixty. Other systems give the same answer to a problem, but arrive at it through another model.

The cluster of stars, the sequence of chemical elements, the morning sun, or numbers all give ways to know the universe. These formations and formulations work. They point us in the right direction, unveil sequence, give us daily rhythm, and open the invisible world of numbers. They give us pattern we can rely on.

But there is another lesson within the sureness of these answers. Remember: these are our impositions, our templates, our models. Our answers are only toeholds to ever-larger truths. We fight wars, hold prejudice, picture the divine in a single way. The truths we hold most dear do not need to be dropped. They can grow as we grow. We still use the number ten system, even as we know there are multiple math systems, even negative numbers, even quantum realities.

We do not just live in the world, we live in our versions and views of it. Our answers can work so well for a time, we forget that there are other ways of seeing, believing, measuring. So multiply your points of view, enlarge your lens, and what looked like opposites may turn into variations on a theme.